Stealing a Feel

I shoot big panoramic landscapes when I want to remember, but I get up close--like the assassin who only uses a knife--when I want to feel.

The best photos in my portfolio are almost entirely what I call eaveshooting, the photographic equivalent of the surreptitious listen over the shoulder of a chatty partygoer. I want to snap a moment in time that will completely vanish if I don't print it to film or fix their pixels in the ineffable web of electrons inside my camera at that very moment. The elicit turn towards the subject, the quick focus, the single snap of the shutter--always cacophonous in my own ears but little more than a fleeting insectile buzz over the subject's shoulder--and then it's done, and I'm moving on, fleeing the scene, hands trembling with the rush of the theft.

I took this photo over the shoulder of a weatherbeaten old man in a classic fisherman's sweater as he and his circle of friends played a game of cards on a small pedestrian balcony-cum-walkway along the Douro River in Porto, Portugal. I love the grain in it, a texture that feels as windburned and craggy as the old man himself; I love the orange and blue in the background, one of those happy accidents of the focal length the moment I fired the shot; and I love the vivid clarity in the cards, his hand packed with Viscounts, Dames, et Rois, the nine of diamonds poised to take its place in the colorful ranks.

But more than any of that, I just love how this photo makes me feel: in the old man's sweater I feel cozy and autumnal, wrapped in memories of hot seafood stew by the water and the Taylor Fladgate port wine house on a hill overlooking the city. In its playing cards I feel the felt top of my grandmother's gaming table in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where we played innumerable hands of gin rummy and drank Coca-Cola from cold bottles and ate Mixed Nuts from a giant tin. And in the whole of the photo I feel the adrenal rush of the moment it was made: seeing the card game from ten feet away, swinging the camera up from my hip, adjusting the lens as I passed, pivoting-aiming-focusing-shooting in one smooth series of moves, and then praying I got it as we walked on.

Sometimes I wonder if he won that hand, and then I realize it's a game that will never end.